ECREA 2010

During the 12th and 15th of October, the University of Hamburg was the host of one of the biggest and most renowned communication research and education conferences: ECREA.

The conference featured 17 sections and welcomed more than a thousand delegates from Europe and beyond. While many of the papers presented sounded interesting, the incredibly busy schedule spread over 10 rooms, several parallel sessions and an entire campus made it difficult to attend them all. Moreover, the schedule was extended unlike any conference I have ever attended up to 8PM in the evening giving not only little visibility to the evening presenters but also putting them in the difficult position of maintaining interest and attention after more than 10-12 hours of conference time.

However, ECREA was the conference were I had the opportunity to be present with two papers: one in collaboration with my colleague Jennifer Jones on our work around online narratives at the Olympics and one premiere presentation of the full results of my dissertation. While the hours were late and the time scarce, I took the challenge of presenting my entire doctoral work in 15 minutes as a baptism of fire and preparation for my future defense.

The video (livestreamed during the conference and recorded thanks to Jennifer’s help) is below. While sharing some of the results, I stressed on the methodological innovation that the thesis brings. This, coupled with Jennifer’s presentation, led to calls for future workshops on social media methods and research from conference participants.